What Kind of Liberal is Obama? An Increasingly Crafty One

From the front pages of the nation’s biggest newspapers to the Web sites of conservative magazines, to the headline on my own post—apologies for its lack of originality—the reaction was uniform: President Obama delivered the most liberal inaugural address in decades, or possibly ever. “President Barack Obama began his second term Monday with an unapologetically liberal vision,” wrote Todd J. Gillman, of the Dallas Morning News. “In effect, Mr. Obama endorsed the entire liberal agenda as the guiding star of his next four years in the White House,” Fred Barnes opined for the Wall Street Journal.

Well, that’s settled then. But what sort of “liberal” is Obama? And is he really one at all? If he is, he represents a curious blend of liberal intent and conservative instincts, insisted über-blogger Andrew Sullivan. “But beneath all of it is a Toryism of sentiment, a Burkean and Niebuhrian understanding of liberal progress, a president with a grasp that tragedy and paradox stalk the human experience,” Sullivan wrote on Monday, “…a fusion of that great conservative insight into human affairs with that great liberal passion for a better future for more and more human beings: something perfectible, but never perfect.”

I’m not sure what this highfalutin passage means—has any President ever served four years without realizing that the world isn’t perfectible?—but it demonstrates an old truth about Obama, which he acknowledged during the 2008 campaign: people see in him what they want to see. Critics on the right see a radical socialist. Critics on the left see a smooth-talking sellout. Some more centrist Obama supporters see a great, and greatly underappreciated, progressive leader.

These versions of Obama are all caricatures. Even some conservatives recognize that Obama is no tribune of the left. “Goldman Sachs doesn’t appear to have anything to worry about,” Daniel McCarthy, the editor of The American Conservative, noted on Monday. “Obama is not a socialist, and even his view of government power employed to foster creativity and commerce is not much to the left of a 19th-century Whig, or the average Cold War Republican president.” That’s not to mention his counterterror philosophy: he has left in place—and, indeed, even expanded—many of the illiberal policies he inherited from George W. Bush. (Even while Obama was speaking, U.S. drone attacks continued in Yemen.)

Like most Democrats, Obama is basically a New Deal liberal. He believes in capitalism restrained by regulation, and a proper social safety net. In establishing the principle of universal medical insurance, he registered his historic claim of having completed the work of Franklin D. Roosevelt (Social Security) and Lyndon Johnson (Medicare and Medicaid). Similarly, with the Dodd-Frank Act, he and his fellow Democrats acknowledged the fact, obscured for thirty years, that market liberalization can have negative effects as well as positive ones. Still, Obama is no F.D.R.; nor is he another Johnson. If he were the operator of a brewery, his brand of interventionism would be sold as “New Deal Lite” or “Great Society Lite”.

Unlike the entitlements for the elderly, which are government-run programs, Obamacare is a privatized system based on mandates and subsidies, which will oblige millions families and individuals to buy costly health-insurance policies on the open market. While the experience of Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts experiment is generally encouraging, we simply don’t know how this system will work out in practice at the national level. Ditto the Dodd-Frank Act, which won’t be tested until we have another financial crisis. Unlike the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, it left the big banks intact—a fact for which the Goldman C.E.O., Lloyd Blankfein, who has just received a bonus of nineteen million dollars, is surely grateful.

Besides regulation, the other major part of the New Deal legacy is redistribution. In the mid-nineteen-twenties, the top rate of income tax was twenty-three per cent. During the nineteen-thirties, F.D.R. raised it to seventy-nine per cent, and during the Second World War he hiked it all the way to ninety-four per cent. Postwar Presidents gradually reduced the top rate, but throughout the nineteen-sixties and nineteen-seventies it remained at seventy per cent. Even allowing for the many loopholes in the system, rich people faced much higher effective rates of taxation then than they do today. The recent agreement between Obama and congressional Republicans that restored the top rate to its Clinton-era level, while politically significant, won’t alter this fact, although it will have some effect: according to the Tax Policy Center, it will reduce the after-tax income of the richest one per cent by about 4.5 per cent.

With higher taxes still unpopular, Obama has also used more covert methods to try to offset the big rise in inequality produced by the more loosely regulated market economy. As Paul Krugman pointed out the other day, Obamacare is significant in this context. In raising the income limits for Medicaid enrollment, the Administration gives a big lift to low-income families. And by levying a 3.8 per cent surcharge on the investment income of high earners, it ensures that the wealthy will bear at least part of the cost of the generous subsidies to middle-income people. Moreover, in expanding the earned-income tax credit and the child tax credit, Obama also beefed up some more covert forms of redistribution that previous Administrations—Democratic and Republican—had introduced.

Setting aside economics, the central component of American liberalism is civil rights. For a former community activist and progressive scholar of the Constitution, Obama was surprisingly quiet during much of his first term on this subject. As far as women and gays go, that now has changed; indeed, Richard Socarides described his inaugural address as “perhaps the most important gay-rights speech in American history.”

In a world of tight budgets and congressional gridlock, one of the advantages of emphasizing civil rights is that it doesn’t cost any money, and it doesn’t involve negotiating with the Republicans. I am not suggesting Obama is being cynical—at least, not anymore. Doubtless, he has privately supported all along the vigorous pursuit of equality for gays and lesbians. Until recently, though, the accepted wisdom in Washington, and elsewhere, was that aggressively pushing gay rights, or even women’s rights, was a vote loser. As that belief has been successfully challenged—first at the state level, and now at the national level—Obama’s political calculus has changed, and so has his language.

However, it is notable that even now he is a bit reticent to bring up the original civil-rights campaign and, especially, to talk about what it means today. Speaking on Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, Obama’s references to the slain black leader were oblique. His references to the continuing socioeconomic subjugation of much of the African-American community were nonexistent. That was largely in keeping with Obama’s first-term record. Solely by his rise to office, and by the shining example that he and his family have set in their personal conduct, the President obviously has made a historic contribution to breaking down racial stereotypes and bolstering self-belief in minority communities. But he rarely, if ever, confronts the legacy of slavery and racism. When he brings up the gender gap in wages, why doesn’t he talk about the racial gap, which is even larger, or the disparity in rates of life expectancy, incarceration, social mobility, and virtually every other indicator of success and well-being?

Presumably, the answer is that he fears provoking a political backlash. Rather than engaging with the economic woes of minority groups head-on, he does it indirectly. Since African-Americans are disproportionately represented in the ranks of the unemployed, and in low-income and low-to-middle-income groups, they are benefitting disproportionately from things like the extension of unemployment benefits, the higher income threshold for Medicaid, and the expansion of the earned-income tax credit. While the White House rarely points this out to the public at large, it doesn’t hesitate to make the case to the Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and other groups in which African-American politicians are prominent.

In this area, as in others, Obama is a thoroughly modern Washington liberal. Despite his personal popularity and his success at the polls, he recognizes that, in large swaths of America, the very word “liberal” remains a pejorative term—especially when it is applied to programs aimed at helping the poor, the low-paid, and the brown-skinned. Operating in what is largely hostile terrain, the crafty liberal politician operates not by subterfuge, exactly, but by embracing subtlety, coöption, and compromise. He wraps himself in the flag and refers to himself as a moderate. He talks about “opportunity” rather than “equality.” And he tries to hit singles and doubles rather than go for the long ball.

Today, the role model for any crafty liberal pol is Bill Clinton, who is now a progressive icon, though liberals were not so thrilled with him when he was actually in office. As a young Southern governor, it is sometimes forgotten, he was a prominent member of the Democratic Leadership Council, a corporate-funded vehicle set up to distance the Democratic Party from its image as a redoubt of McGovern-Carter-Mondale liberalism. In opposition to the sixties- and seventies-era language of rights and entitlements, Clinton talked extensively about responsibilities and obligations. Portraying himself as “New Democrat,” he tried to redefine liberalism as a social contract rather than a handout. During his eight years as President, he raised taxes on the rich and expanded tax credits for low earners, but also abolished large parts of the welfare system and declared that the era of big government was over.

Obama, during his even more meteoric rise, relied largely on his personal narrative, and his personal talents, rather than any particular group or standpoint. But if you read closely his speech at the Democratic Convention in Charlotte and Monday’s inaugural address, you will find echoes of Clinton, particularly in the notion of citizenship, which comes attached with individual rights but also with mutual interests and obligations. In Obama’s telling on Monday, those interests are the rationale for federal expenditures on teachers and roads and scientific research projects; they are the justification for payments to retirees, disabled workers, and Hurricane Sandy victims. Such outlays aren’t merely handouts to Mitt Romney’s infamous forty-seven per cent, Obama insisted: “They strengthen us. They do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great.”

What was largely absent from the speech, which was basically a rallying cry for the President’s supporters, was any reference to the less palatable side of the citizenship bargain: the obligation to pay for the social safety net, and to ensure it doesn’t eventually swallow up the rest of the federal budget, including many of the public investments liberals want to make. On the left and the right, the consensus appears to be that Obama is now backing away from any serious effort to reform entitlements—that he is content to lock in some modest deficit reduction in other areas, and let his successors deal with the Medicare time bomb.

Can that be right? Other reports suggest that he would like to go down in history as the President who solved the entitlements crisis, putting the finances of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid on a more sustainable course, and preserving them for future generations. Coupled with the successful implementation of Obamacare, surely that would be a liberal achievement to set alongside those of F.D.R. and Johnson. But is it politically feasible? The increasingly canny liberal that he is, Obama, I would guess, hasn’t yet decided.